Born on 12 January 1884 in Waco, Mary Louise Cecilia "Texas" Guinan played a gun-slinger and rode bareback in silent films, took New York by storm in 1906, and earned a salary of $700,000 as a speakeasy hostess. Here are highlights from a life led at full speed until 5 November 1933. Meet TEXAS GUINAN!

Monday, December 07, 2015

Texas Guinan: Ladies, Nag Not

TEXAS GUINAN spoke to a Los Angeles Women's Club and told them how they helped her get rich by nagging their husbands which heightened the men's desire to escape to her rowdy pleasure dome. As usual, pragmatism and an understanding of human nature were held high in her hand of aces.• • "Texas Guinan Made 'Whoopee' a Source of Fame" • •• • West Coast journalist Cecilia Rasmussen wrote: She was a purveyor of speak-easy booze — — and other illicit pleasures — — whose advice to other women would have set even a tepid feminist's teeth on edge: "If you women would amuse your husbands when they come home, they wouldn't slip away and pay a $5 cover charge to get a little excitement," Texas Guinan once told members of a Los Angeles women's club. "Humor them! Don't nag them! Do you know what made me a rich woman? Wives who talk to their husbands about gas bills and curtains."• • Cecilia Rasmussen explained: It wasn't exactly an example of elevated consciousness, but it was the sort of unembarrassed pragmatism that took a small-town Texas girl from the music hall stage to the silent screen to the glamorous gin mills of the Great White Way and back again — — with stops in between for appearances in various courtrooms, where she also was something of a hit.• • Cecilia Rasmussen continued: Years before she achieved a kind of celebrity — — or notoriety — — as the wisecracking "Queen of the Night Clubs," which she ran for the New York mob, Guinan was a Catholic schoolgirl in Waco, Texas, the daughter of Irish immigrant parents to whom she was born in 1884. . . .